“James Drake: Anatomy of Drawing and Space (Brain Trash)”

In spending more than two years making 1,242 drawings, artist James Drake learned a thing or two.

“Believe it or not,” said the genial, Texas-born artist as he oversaw the installation of his new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, “I learned that less is more.”

That might seem odd, given that this is Drake’s largest exhibition in a distinguished career spanning four decades and hundreds of shows worldwide. It is also one of the biggest single installations ever mounted by MCASD.

With the exception of a small gallery displaying some of Drake’s earlier works, “James Drake: Anatomy of Drawing and Space (Brain Trash)” fills all of the institution’s cavernous downtown space.

And yet, upon seeing this wondrous assemblage of images, Drake’s statement is completely understandable. His work occupies a universe where less and more are not opposites, but happily co-exist, as does the personal and the public, the abstract and the representational, the scientific and the intuitive, the formal and the informal, the spoken and the unspoken.

The list goes on, given that such seeming dualities are at the core of Drake’s work. But every viewer will extract his own list, or even create his own world, from Drake’s remarkable achievement.

“When we first saw the individual drawings — and we saw a lot of them — and you really looked at these drawings, they worked one at a time, and two at a time, and as clusters,” said the museum’s chief curator, Kathryn Kanjo.“So it’s something about that small part also being something larger.

“But what was revealed ultimately was how, through the practice of drawing, he’s able to reiterate all of his creative, intellectual and artistic concerns. It is his retrospective exhibition in a single work.”

Creative freedom

You could also turn that thought around and say that all of Drake’s art constitutes a single exhibition.

“I think of all of the work I’ve ever done as one big piece,” Drake said. “I know that sounds a little crazy. Now I’ve finally done one big piece and it has all of those elements (that are found in his other work).

“But the most exciting thing, really, was just the idea of being free to do whatever I felt like in the studio without any restriction, except the size of the paper. That was the real (kick), for me.”

Until a couple of years ago, Drake had generally worked around themes, whether his photographs of transvestite prostitutes in Juarez and El Paso — “Qué Linda La Brisa” — that were shown in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, or his video installation — “Tongue-Cut Sparrows (Inside Outside),” exhibited in the 2007 Venice Biennial, which dealt with language (even unspoken language) and was prompted by the women who congregate outside of jails and silently communicate with their family members inside.

Boundaries — whether external or internal, physical or psychological — have often been a recurring theme in Drake’s work.

But his only boundary in “Brain Trash” was the 19-by-24-inch paper, and the intent to do a drawing a day and display them in consecutive order, unedited.

“I just wanted to see where that takes me, basically,” Drake said. “I thought, well, I’ll just make some drawings. And I’ll make a thousand, or I’ll make 500, or if I get tired at 732, OK, fine. If it’s through, that’s it. If it’s not, fine, I’ll keep going.”

The 1,242 drawings are divided into 10 chapters, which are not so much about content as about how many drawings could fit on each of the museum’s walls. Inevitably, certain themes develop (many familiar from Drake’s other works), and a number of them spread over multiple pieces of paper, including a large likeness of Drake’s MRI scan a doctor labeled “Brain Trash” (instead of Drake’s name), inadvertently giving the exhibit its title.

“It just sort of emerged,” said Drake of the exhibition. “There was no plan. Sometimes when I went in the studio I had no idea what I was going to do. And I liked that. It really opened up avenues I never would have explored otherwise.”

Although Drake has had considerable success as a sculptor, a photographer and a video artist, his true love is drawing. And while he employs some collage, whether his EKG graph pasted to the paper, old maps, a page ripped out of a phone book, or snippets of text (including his own poems), the vast majority of the pieces are drawings — most of them revealing an expert, elegant hand and a certain spaciousness of composition.

“Subconsciously maybe it’s a reaction to all the technology,” Drake said. “Everyone is a photographer, everyone’s an artist, everyone is a videographer, everyone is a filmmaker, because they can do it through technology.

“Well, some people can and some can’t. With this, there’s no computer involved. No technology. There’s just drawing, going back to the real beginning.”

Creative listening

Drake’s own history starts in Lubbock, Texas. He grew up in Guatemala (Spanish is his first language), moved back to Texas (this time El Paso, where, to fit in, he had to relearn Spanish with a Texas accent), was educated in California (two degrees from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles), returned to El Paso (where he spent two decades), and ended up in Santa Fe (by way of New York).

“I’m permanently in Santa Fe and I like it,” said Drake, now 68. “I like the Hispanic culture. I’m comfortable in that environment.”

Those experiences in proximity to the border strongly inform his art, including “Brain Trash.” But in “Brain Trash,” he has allowed them to rise to the surface rather than thinking them into the piece.

“I found you have to let the work speak back to you instead of you dictating all the time how it should be,” Drake said. “It talks back to you and goes, ‘OK, now the next one.’ Or, ‘Now you should do this.’ ”

He became a better listener, and even after so many drawings, he and his art are still on speaking terms. He’s up to 1,279 drawings and sees at least a year or two more of drawing ahead.

“It depends on the spaces,” he said. “I’m working with a space on the East Coast, and if they go, ‘Well, we only have this much space,’ OK, I’ll make it fit. So it will be Chapter 11 in that space.”

And Chapters 12, 13 and 14?

“It is born, and it will have a rebirth and hopefully continue,” Drake said.